If you're already comfortable with another object oriented language then picking up ruby is pretty straight forward, but I'll tell you what worked the best for

If you're already comfortable with another object oriented language then picking up ruby is pretty straight forward, but I'll tell you what worked the best for me. I started out reading some of the above mentioned books, but when it came to sitting down and programming I still felt a bit lost. So I simple started with writing tests for very very simple things. Like test_print_hello_ten_times to teach me how to create an array and loop over it. I basically test drove how to work with the basic building blocks of the language and literally in an hour or two I felt very comfortable working in ruby. Now I come from a background of doing TDD in java, so your milage my vary, but this was a very natural and easy approach to learning the language.